He's okay

Drawing lines isn't an entertaining pastime, but the very best games can make a boring activity riotous fun.

Jack Lumber almost fits into that category, but it falls short in a couple of key areas, leaving you with a game that's entertaining, attractive to look at, but never quite as good as it promises to be.

Chops down trees, has lunch

The game casts you as the titular chopper of wood, who's out on a mission to avenge the death of his grandmother at the hands of a jewel-encrusted pine tree. Cue a hack through a variety of different settings, slicing lumps of wood.

Different-sized logs fly into view, and when you push a finger on the screen time slows down to a crawl. You then have a finite amount of time to trace a line through the different pieces of tree, before lifting your finger back up and watching them split.

As the game progresses you'll have to deal with different types of log - some that you need to cut multiple times, and other that you can only hack apart with swipes in one specific direction.

The last screen of each level features an animal, and you have to make sure the lines you draw don't go anywhere near the fragile critter or you'll have to go through the level all over again.

Log on

When Maple Syrup jars pop up you have to add them to the end of the chain of cuts for a bonus swing at some carefully arranged logs. You can also buy different syrups and add them to your axe to give you a boost, but they're never really necessary.

Jack Lumber is an entertaining, at times testing line-drawer, but it never really sparks into life. Its difficulty curve is too much of a smooth, barely noticeable incline, and while it adds different types of logs the basic shape of the game never really changes.

There's enough content here to keep you playing for a good few hours, and chasing high scores is addictive, but Jack Lumber is lacking that spark that turns the greatest mobile games into compulsions.